"The world's best-known 'cypherpunk' has long been on a mission to stop governments watching our every move. It is said to be the key to understanding WikiLeaks. Although there are tens of thousands of articles on Julian Assange in the world's newspapers and magazines, no mainstream journalist so far has grasped the critical significance of the cypherpunks movement to Assange's intellectual development and the origin of WikiLeaks. ... At the core of the cypherpunk philosophy was the belief that the great question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually undermine and even destroy the state through their deployment of electronic weapons newly at hand." Excerpt online: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10710 269 Full 19-page essay by AU politics professor Robert Manne: http://cryptome.org/0003/assange-manne.zip (6.2MB)